Building a plan with regular races and adaptive training

Hi Team,

I am new to Trainer Road and am looking to build my first plan. I have quite a bit of structured training experience on other platforms and a decent base under my belt.

What is the best way to account for two Zwift races per week in a plan? I have ZRL races on a Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning. Other than that it will be indoor structured training.

  1. Do I build a plan, switch the workouts around so that the two difficult ones are Tuesday and Wednesday, and then mark them as “Outdoor”? This way it will be incorporated into the 'Adaptive Training Plan", however, the type of workout (i.e. Zwift race) will be a different type of workout to that which was initially scheduled.

  2. Build a plan but include two C races each week. This would exclude them from an Adpative Training Plan though?

  3. Chose a LV plan instead (I was going to chose MV, possibly HV) and have the two races on top of that. I would simply rearrange the LV plan and free up Tue & Wed for the Zwift races.

  4. Any other ideas that you can come up with?

I don’t want to do more than 500-550 TSS per week as that is when I’ll burn out. I have very short power so I am more about intensity than volume.

Any help appreciated

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Welcome @JasoR !

I’m in a relatively similar spot, doing those same Tuesday night ZRL races. My approach this season is to have a plan on the calendar, and just sub out the Tuesday workouts for the races (and then try to find a similar enough workout to associate it with). So for you I’d likely do the MV plan (given your 500 - 550 TSS goal) and then sub in your two races for the harder workouts midweek.

My one question is racing both Tuesday evening and then Wednesday morning - how sold are you on this plan? Asking because I feel like that’s way too little recovery between races, I’m personally doing at most two per week (definitely Tuesday evening and possibly Saturday morning), hard for me to perform at my peak with any less recovery between them.

If you are sold on Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning my approach would likely be something like: start with MV plan, set your midweek effort days as Tues & Weds (as opposed to the usual Tues / Thurs), low effort on Thursday, off or recovery Friday, and then two structured days on the weekend.

Which ZRL league / class are you in?

Good luck!

Firstly, you MUST build it in Plan Builder for AT to work.

Then, when you go through the process it asks you how you want to structure your days during the week, so you can put workouts on different days to your races if you wish. However, with 2 Zwift races you really wont want 4 or 5 TR intervals days as well.

No TR plans are going to make allowances for 2 additional races/hard interval sessions per week. Many people will say 2, or at max 3, hard sessions is all you should do each week anyway, so if you’re hitting those Zwift days hard, and back to back, you will have to significantly hack and slash any TR plan to account for that. Perhaps choose a LV plan and ignore/delete the Tues interval session and then move the hard Thurs session to a Friday to give you a rest after your 2 races?

TR plans are NOT good for changing around like this and cutting workouts means AT is going to think you aren’t doing them and wont analyse your Zwift race instead, so you will not see the correct progressions from the work you’re actually doing.

Thanks for the info.

I think I’ll go with the MV plan with the two harder workouts on Tuesday and Wednesday. I don’t think I’ll race two days every week as both my teams have 7 man squads.

Whilst not perfect, I like this plan because when I am not racing, I’ll default back to a nicely structured plan - especially between seasons and days that I am sitting out.

I raced EMEA A2 and AM West A1 back to back in Season two. I had about 4 or 5 hours between the two. Surprisingly I would hit similar numbers in both races, however, my sprint was generally down on the second race. The only time I really regretted the decision was that course with three volcano climbs (so 6 climbs for me!).

This year I am racing B1 in both APAC and EMEA-N (my FTP is down 29 watts).

I am in the same boat here. I’ve added the ZRL races as C races in plan builder, they just replace the Tuesday hard workout.

The other option would be the low volume Polarized plan which is 1 hard day & 2 endurance days.